Dramatic Arts

The course offers a critical and historical perspectives of the Chilean theater in the 20th and 21st centuries, focusing on the dramatic dimension. In particular, the course goes over the relationships between the production of drama in the region and the circumstances of cultural rearticulation in which this belongs to.

This course engages with theater texts, and relations between text, performance and the social world. From the naturalist stage of the late 19th century to contemporary verbatim performance, theater practitioners have frequently sought to represent social reality in order to critique it. This course explores the methods and implications of theater’s "reality-effects" and considers why it is that so many theater companies and practitioners in the 21st century have turned to documentary, tribunal, verbatim, and other forms of reality-based performance-making. The courses explores a contrasting range of plays and performance texts from around the world, and builds a strong awareness of the politics, possibilities and limitations of "staging the real."

This course equips students with skills for analyzing performance as distinct from written text. It facilitates students' critical and productive engagement with London and the vast cultural resources and history it has to offer and explores some of the current issues in cultural politics and critical ways of approaching them. The course involves fieldwork at various sites around London and attendance at performances and events, and it requires critical response to seminar-based discussion.

The course introduces students to the main currents of modern European drama and theatre by providing an in-depth analysis of twelve most representative plays by Henrik Ibsen, A. P. Chekhov, Luigi Pirandello, Bertolt Brecht, Witold Gombrowicz, Jean Genet, Max Frisch, Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard. Students acquire knowledge of advanced methods of drama analysis and enhance their skills in drama and theatre analysis.

How and why are Shakespeare’s plays performed, filmed, read, and taught from China to Chile, from Singapore to South Africa? What makes Shakespeare a “global” force? Shakespeare's plays display the vast panoply of human desires and emotions: from passionate love to bewildering fear, from unswerving loyalty to basest envy, from the noblest instances of self-sacrifice to the desire to inflict unspeakable pain. His depictions of these emotions are often shocking in their vividness, yet always recognizable as fundamental facets of human experience. This course will look at Shakespeare’s afterlives in different parts of the world, and include hands-on workshops in which students try out different possible ways of interpreting “global” plays like Antony and Cleopatra.